Articles tagged with 'Rave'

Direct Rave Import

Our goal at TrialGrid is to assure the quality of Medidata Rave Study Builds and accelerate the build process. Working with the TrialGrid system should be as frictionless as possible but the process of getting Rave Drafts into TrialGrid requires the user to download the Draft as an Architect Loader Spreadsheet (ALS) from Rave and then to load this ALS into TrialGrid. This import/export takes only a few minutes but it is a form of friction, slowing the process.

So exactly a year ago we started discussions with our friends at Medidata on how to improve this integration and today we're pleased to announce that TrialGrid now has the ability to import Drafts directly from Rave.

Let's walk through it.

First enter the Rave URL you wish to import from. Rave URL's usually have the form https://{name}.mdsol.com (e.g. https://innovate.mdsol.com). You can enter the full URL or just the {name} part.

Enter URL

You will also need to enter a Rave Username and Password. This must be a Rave User Account not an iMedidata/Cloud Admin account since the solution makes use of Rave Web Services behind the scenes and Rave Web Services uses Rave Accounts only (for now).

Note that we do not store this username and password in the TrialGrid system. They don't get saved in the database and are encrypted in transmission.

With a URL and user credentials we can provide a list of Projects the user has access to in that URL and a list of Drafts in each Project. Select the Draft you wish to import (you can search within the Draft list):

Select Draft

Once selected the import process begins just as if the user had uploaded the Draft themselves:

Draft Import

Imports direct from Rave may take a few seconds or a few minutes depending on the size of the Draft but the user doesn't have to sit and wait for it to happen. These imports take place as background tasks so the TrialGrid user can move on to doing something else while the process runs.

Faster Fingerprinting

It is worth noting that on the TrialGrid side we continue to try to make import as fast as possible. One of the longest parts of the process is the calculation of unique "fingerprints" for each design object in the file. We use these fingerprints to detect changes between draft objects and their definitions in libraries. Included in this release is an improvement to this calculation which improves performance by 25-50%.

What is coming in 2019?

What about exporting Drafts from TrialGrid back to Rave? We're working on it and you can expect to see this feature in early 2019 but at the moment we're hard at work putting the finishing touches to the first release of our Automated User Acceptance Testing (UAT) feature.

Don't miss our Automated UAT unveiling Webinar on January 10 2019. Free registration at

https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/2929700804630029324

See you there!

Upgrading to Rave 2018.1

One of the changes in the next Medidata Rave release, Rave 2018.1.0, is that standard fields in Edit Checks must have a Record Position of 0. This has long been a recommended best practice but up till now has not been required. Rave will now check that the Record Position is correct when saving an edit check in Architect, when uploading an Architect Loader spreadsheet and when publishing a Draft. If you try to publish a Draft with invalid Record Positions you'll see this error message:

Publish error

There is a good reason for enforcing this rule - it means that there will be no confusion between standard fields and log fields when executing the Edit Check. But if you have existing studies or libraries it may take hours of work for each Draft to locate and update Edit Checks. Unless you're using TrialGrid!

TrialGrid's Diagnostic 0027 analyses all Edit Checks and Derivations, quickly showing you which ones need to be updated:

Diagnostic 0027

and then updating them is as simple as clicking the 'Fix' button. In minutes you can have reviewed and corrected them all!

Diagnostic 0027 is one of the 79 Diagnostics available now to all existing TrialGrid users. We have Diagnostics to help with other upcoming changes in Rave 2018.1.0 and with upgrading to RaveX. As and when Medidata introduce new features and enhancements in Rave Architect, we ensure that TrialGrid is up to date and compatible with the latest changes, and look for ways we can help with upgrades.

Contact us if you would like a demo or to know more.

Unicode

If you haven't heard of Unicode you have certainly seen it. You are seeing it now since Unicode is the standard for the encoding of characters viewable in Web Browsers and on computers in general. As of this writing, version 10 of the standard includes more then 136,000 characters from multiple writing systems and Medidata Rave supports the Unicode standard both for study designs and for data collection. So what is the problem?

Actually, there is no problem so long as you know what characters from the Unicode standard are being used in your study, where they are and how they display and appear in outputs.

Unicode in Study Design

If you are building your study in Japanese or localizing it to Russian, Armenian or Greek then having the full set of Unicode characters to use is vital. For studies in English you may want to stick to the set of 128 characters known as ASCII (a-Z, 0-9 and symbols). But sometimes you can be surprised by characters that aren՚t what you think they are…

Did you spot those alternative characters hiding in the last sentence?

characters that aren՚t what you think they are…

vs:

characters that aren't what you think they are...

Still can't see it? Hint: It's the ՚ and the … The differences are (or at least, may be) subtle on the screen but when we render them in a Rave PDF they appear quite different:

Apostrophe and Ellipsis

It is very hard for the human eye to distinguish between these characters the way they are rendered in Browsers but they are different characters and the font that Rave uses to display characters won't have a way to render all 135,000 possible characters so it is best (in English studies at least) to stick to characters that appear in the limited ASCII set of characters that all fonts cover well.

Be especially wary of text that is cut and pasted from web pages, Word and Excel or from PDF documents. It is very tempting to copy verbatim from a Protocol document but word processors use all kinds of character variants to make writing look better on the screen or in print. You can't even trust the spaces in these documents because Unicode defines at least 20 different "empty" space characters of different widths including one that has no width at all (i.e. it is invisible!)

Tip: TrialGrid Diagnostic 70 will identify and highlight non-ASCII characters, even invisible ones

Unicode in Study Data

If unexpected characters in study design can cause strange PDF outputs, unexpected or unwanted characters in the clinical data can be real poison. A study that collects data in the English language might expect that all the text data in the study is in ASCII. However, Rave will accept data input to text fields of any Unicode character so the same problems of cut & pasted content can occur. Rave is 100% Unicode compatible so it will happily take, store and output any Unicode content but SAS and other analysis programs may have to be set to accept non-ASCII content.

In English studies you want to identify non-ASCII content at the point of entry. This can only be done with a Custom Function that looks at the content of a text field and determines if any of the characters are outside the ASCII range. A quick search of the web will throw up simple code which will return true if it finds a non-ASCII character in the input string:

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    //Take string from datapoint.Data or datapoint.StandardValue
    string s = "characters that aren՚t what you think they are…";  

    foreach (char c in s)
    { 
        if (((int)c) > 127) 
        { 
            return true; 
        } 
    } 
    return false;

Tip: TrialGrid contains a CQL extension that makes this as easy as using FieldName.IsNotAscii in an Edit Check.

Summary

Rave handles Unicode really well and web browsers are very good at displaying a wide range of Unicode characters but not all characters can be displayed by all systems so be careful what you put into your study design and what you collect in your study data. Being able to cut and paste text between systems is great for productivity but can have unintended consequences.